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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

renee emerson

Renee Emerson is the
author of Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing 2014). She earned her MFA
in poetry from Boston University, where she was also awarded the Academy of
American Poets Prize in 2009. She is also the author of three chapbooks of
poetry: Where Nothing Can Grow (Batcat Press, 2012), The Whitest Sheets
(Maverick Duck Press, 2011), and Something Like Flight (Sargent Press, 2010).
Her poetry has been published in 32 Poems, Christianity and Literature, Indiana
Review, Literary Mama, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, and elsewhere.
Renee teaches creative writing and composition at a small Christian university
in Georgia, where she lives with her husband and daughters.

Tell us about your relationship to your art.

I wanted to write
fiction when I was a little girl, but in college I began reading modern poetry
and was lured away. A good poem thrills me. Lineation just right, a reach
toward epiphany at the end. I am always amazed at the way a poem can take plain
English, that even cats and dogs can read, and wring out the beauty in it. I’ve
heard English described as a mutt language, a rhyme-poor language, and various
other negative terms, but I think poets prove that wrong.

What's a project (yours or another's) that has been
exciting you lately?

My first book Keeping Me Still. is coming out on April
2nd through the indie
publisher Winter Goose Publishing, so I’ve just begun working on my second
collection. That’s all I’ll say on that for now though—writers who write too
much about their writing projects never seem to actually finish said writing
projects!

Tell us a little of your motherhood journey.

I have two daughters,
a two year old and nine month old. I was never one of those girls that loved
holding babies and working in the church nursery and babysitting little nieces
and nephews for next to nothing. The first diaper I changed was my own
daughter’s, in the hospital room, with the help of my husband. We were so
scared to break her, it took both of us to change that first diaper, so
impossibly small! The biggest struggle for me was the first six weeks of my
oldest daughter’s life. I think back on it now as my own Kafka-esque
metamorphosis in reverse. Motherhood has been God’s grace to me.

What are some crucial elements of your process?
How has that changed since having children?

I like to have a good
poetry book to read (right now I’m going through the SouthernPoetry Anthology: Appalachia), a notebook, a
pen, and solitude. I needed the same things before having children—the solitude
is much harder to come by than it used to be.

What are some of the ways your
family and your art interact?

The poor dears can
barely escape it. My books lay all around the house like lazy dogs. Every once
in a while, June, the baby, will teach me right by grabbing hold of one and
giving it a good shake and slobbering on. My husband reads my first drafts and
listens to my boring rambles about ideas for poems.

Do you find your attitude towards your art might be
different because of your parenting / has it changed since you became a parent?

After becoming a
mother, I learned to value my writing more for what it does for my spiritual
and emotional well-being rather than what it does for my vain ambitions and
attention-seeking. I still send out my work and love seeing it in print, but I
don’t need it the same way I used to. Validation, proof that what I am doing is
worthwhile. After becoming a mother, I began writing for myself, my husband, my
children, my children’s children. I want to connect with them in a way that
only poetry can. So that changed things quite a bit.

Are your children ever subjects in your
art?

I
often write about my children; much of my poetry stems from what I find
meaningful and beautiful in everyday life, and motherhood fits into that
category so nicely. On the other hand, just like with any of my family members,
I refrain from publishing or making public any poems that could embarrass them
in high school.

Aside from the obvious need of more time, what has
been one of the most difficult obstacles you’ve had in regards to parenting and
your art?

Letting go of my own
expectations for myself and my writing was tough. Like any proper first-born
daughter,I was pretty driven and
rigorous when it came to my writing schedule and how much I wrote in a week,
month, year. The first year of raising my oldest daughter, Susan, was like
multiple reiterations of one lesson—let go of how I think it should be.

In turn, what are some of the saving graces?

I’m a much faster and
more efficient writer now that I have children. When I have a spare half-hour
to write in, I don’t fool around. Typically, if given any time to write at all,
I’ll at least emerge with a working draft of a new poem. I’ve also relearned
the beauties of handwriting first drafts; since it is easier to jot down lines
in a notebook, I tend to write my drafts by hand now and only type them up when
the poem is complete. How do you escape?

This time ofyear I don’t have the schedule or funds to
literally escape—no drowsy afternoons in the local coffee shop or solitary
walks through the lovely forests for me. I tend to find escape through mundane
weekly chores. Cooking simple meals, folding laundry, sweeping floors. If I
don’t have a “helper”—my two year old—with the chore, I daydream. It sounds
boring, but sometimes the repetition of mindless chores, with the physical,
textural aspect of working with my hands while I think about one thing at a
time feels like a breather when compared to the constant multi-tasking required
when mothering a toddler and infant and working full-time.

What advice do you have for expectant mothers in your
field?

Likely, you will not
have as much (or much at all) time to write when your children are very little,
especially if you have a lot of them, close in age. For a while, most of the
poetry you read might be nursery rhymes or a book you are holding open with one
hand while you cradle a baby in the other. Your poems might take weeks or
months to write because all you have time for is one line at a time. It’s
ok—don’t give up! You’re filling with all kinds of good stuff that will get
into your poems, maybe directly or maybe just as a place for you to stand as
you look in a completely different direction. Diaper changes and weeknight
dinners and putting little Velcro shoes on little feet—it’s all working towards
the poem. My daughters are only nine months old and two years old, so I don’t
know anything beyond that.